‘He Had a Pretty Good Scam Going’: Republican on Ethics Committee Marvels at George Santos

CNN’s Jake Tapper spoke with Rep. David Joyce (R-OH), who sits on the House Ethics Committee, about the latest revelations regarding fabulist Rep. George Santos (R-NY).

Tapper began the interview by discussing Thursday’s Ethics Committee’s report on Santos, which quickly led to Santos announcing he would no longer seek reelection.

“If there’s a motion to expel him, will you vote for it?” Tapper asked Joyce.

“Well, sir, I may have to run that investigation on the floor, because technically, on the floor, he’s going to have, he’ll be allowed to provide a defense,” Joyce replied, adding:

And so I don’t want to be considered to be prejudging him. If I’m necessarily the prosecutor on it. But I think the as you have laid out and certainly Manu [Raju] has laid out, that the case against him is very strong and it gives people the opportunity to have the evidence there in front of them.

Because one thing about a records case like this, records don’t lie. I don’t need him to tell me anything. I look at the numbers. The numbers speak to me. The numbers should speak to every member who reads that. He said he did this and the records show that he did not. He supposedly put in loans.

“He had a pretty good scam going. I mean, really he was scamming his campaign. He was scamming his office, scamming the people of New York Three that elected him,” Joyce concluded.

Tapper then drilled into some of the specific findings in the report:

Let’s go through some of the ways your committee found he spent his campaign funds on he spent campaign funds on a Las Vegas hotel charges, when he told his campaign he was on his honeymoon, more than $3,000 on an Airbnb. When he said he was off at the Hamptons, he paid off his personal credit card bills, a $4,000 purchase at Irma’s. Obviously, OnlyFans, which I understand you just learned about what that is, congratulations on just learning about what that is.

“Just to be clear here, when members of Congress come, come to Washington, they’re told they’re not allowed to spend campaign funds on things like this, right?” Tapper then asked.

“Absolutely. I mean, one should understand that without having to be told,” Joyce shot back, adding:

But the idea that he was not only defrauding investors to his campaign, he created another agency, Red Strategies, that he, Redstone Strategies, that he was in telling people to put money into that was supposedly going to do outside spending on his campaign in excess of what an individual donation would be. And then he was taking that money out to pay back himself or pay himself to do whatever. And then he was also taking money that he supposedly lent to his campaign, which wasn’t true.

Falsifying the records to increase the amount that there would appear to be on hand to show that he was a viable candidate in order to get help from the NRCC and other agencies or other groups outside groups to help him, and then repaid himself from the loans that he never put in to put into his candidacy in the first place. So he had schemes working all over his his campaign. And he’s basically a fraud that doesn’t deserve to hold the title of congressman.

Watch the full clip above via CNN.